[Matt Q]

Hi Alessio,

I think you have a potentially interesting metaphor here: the N comparing themself to a fish who is lured and caught, and would then rather be dead than hooked.

However, the faux-archaic language distracts me too much from the rest of the poem, and so that any emotional impact the poem might have doesn't really reach me: "strook" and the "aback" and the rest serve mostly to distance me. I think you can have it sound old-fashioned and songlike without employing archaic words and grammar, and it would be more effective for it.

I've said too much to try oppose your spurns

There's a "to" missing here after "try", I think, unless this is an archaic construction I'm not familiar with.

And cursed the day I first had seen you smile

Seems off in its use of the pluperfect. Why not "first saw you"? "first had seen you" would seem to be after the N first saw the beloved so that the seeing was already in the past.

"like a fish by specks of joy’s beguiled"

has me a bit confused. Is that a typo so that "joy's" should be "joy"? Otherwise "beguiled" is functioning as a noun, "joy's beguiled" being those who have been beguiled by joy. But I'm not sure that reading makes sense in context.

Just noticed you've posted a revision since I started writing this. The above relates to your original version.

It looks you wanted to indent lines in your poem. Adding spaces doesn't work for this, as you'll have discovered. If you click on the "Go Advanced" button in the editor, you'll see indent buttons at the top of the editor. Alternatively, for more precision on the indent size, you can use full stops (or any other character) to indent the line, then select the full stops and change their colour to white, so that they're no longer visible.

best,

Matt